Road-Crossing Landmarks Detection by Outdoor Mobile Robots

Notably, a salient shortfall of most outdoor mobile robots is their lack of ability to autonomously cross roads while traveling along pedestrian sidewalks in an urban outdoor environment. If it has the ability to intuitively cross a road, the robot could then travel longer distances and more complex routes than originally possible. To this effect, the authors have been developing technologies that attempt to endow such a road-crossing function to outdoor mobile robots. In this paper, a system for road-crossing landmarks detection and localization for outdoor mobile robots is presented. We show how a robot equipped with a single monocular camera and laser range finder sensor can accurately detect, identify and localize roadcrossing landmarks such as pedestrian push button boxes, zebra crossings and pedestrian lights that the robots needs to be aware of and use in order to autonomously cross roads. In addition, experimental results and future plans are discussed.